by Phil Kloer | Mar 10, 2010
There will be no snoozing in the mezzanine during “Spring Awakening,” the electrifying youthapalooza musical that’s taking over Atlanta's Fox Theatre through Sunday, March 14. Some folks may choose to slip out quietly midway, as a few did on opening night, deciding this is not the Rodgers and Hammerstein they signed up for.
But dozing is not an option. After first taking Off-Broadway then Broadway by storm in 2006, winning eight Tony Awards and everything else they hand out, “Spring Awakening” has finally made it to Atlanta. It’s not for everyone -- rock musicals with onstage sex, a suicide, an ...
by Phil Kloer | Feb 26, 2010
Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” has been presented, and perceived, as an exercise in folksy nostalgia, a comfortably configured time machine back to a simpler era when genial doctors made house calls, milkmen delivered freshly sweating glass bottles to the back stoop and nobody locked their doors at night. If you want to absorb it at that level, fine, although that could lead to the very complacency that Wilder is warning us against in the end.
Certainly Kenny Leon isn’t into it for the pull of the past. His new version of “Our Town” at True Colors Theatre Company, playing at Atlanta’s ...
by Phil Kloer | Jan 27, 2010
What hath Mel wrought? When Mel Brooks remade his movie “The Producers” into a mega-musical in 2001, he won an armload of Tonys and made more money than God’s hedge fund manager. He also jump-started the unstoppable trend of churning out musical theater based on movies, which has led to the good (“Spamalot”) and the not-so (“The Wedding Singer”).
Producers, the real ones, love these shows because the audience already knows and presumably loves the basic franchise. But beware the double-edged sword: The musical also has to compete with the audience’s fond memory of the original, and there “Young Frankenstein,” which ...
by Phil Kloer | Jan 21, 2010
Suddenly, a cappella is hella cool. Credit the TV hit “Glee,” with its gloriously over-produced high school glee club numbers, which more or less begat NBC’s recent reality competition “The Sing Off,” with its varied vocal groups all harmonizing their hearts out. And now comes “Avenue X,” fresh to the Alliance Theatre stage, an off-Broadway musical that blends doo-wop, gospel and early rhythm and blues as sung by eight very talented singers without a single musical instrument for accompaniment. The show runs through Feb. 7.
It’s all a long way from a cappella’s roots in early church music (the term means ...
by Phil Kloer | Jan 8, 2010
Lust, drunkenness, greed, revenge, pettiness, violence and, oh, what the hell, more lust. If Geoffrey Chaucer were around today, he’d have a development deal for an HBO series.
Even though his “Canterbury Tales” was written in the 14th century, it sports a sensibility instantly recognizable in today’s tabloid culture. Atlanta's New American Shakespeare Tavern has dusted off its version of the “Tales” -- actually the adaptation John Stephens did for Theatre Gael a decade ago, and which the Tavern revived last year -- for another run of ribaldry. Some fine moments and performances do battle with some inherent problems, and ...
by Phil Kloer | Dec 4, 2009
“Scrooge in Rouge” bills itself as “Somewhat Loosely Based on the Idea of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens,” and it doesn’t get much looser than this new gender-bending musical. There’s a man playing a woman, a woman playing a man, a man playing a woman playing a man, a hapless “volunteer” from the audience playing Tiny Tim and loads of bawdy humor; I don’t think Queen Victoria would be amused, but the opening night audience, which as you might imagine skewed Midtown and male, certainly was.
It’s 1843, and the Royal Music Hall 20 Member Variety Players at Her Majesty’s ...
